Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization

Shichao Sun, Ruifeng Yuan, Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.449
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7551–7558
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.449
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.449
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shichao Sun, Ruifeng Yuan, Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie Li, and Pengfei Liu. 2024. Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7551–7558, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (Sun et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.449.pdf